GUITAR FOR BEGINNERS
Course Description:
COURSE PROGRAMME;
Week 1
The first lesson starts with some ‘useful information’ about the guitar to familiarize the student with the instrument. We will also look at some accessories for the guitar such as; plectrums and capos. We will learn about tuning the guitar and playing our first three chords and our first strum.
Week 2
We are ready to look at the first song. The first thing we need to do is to familiarize ourselves with the chord sequence. We will learn about bars, so there’s 2 bars of A,2 D’s,2 A’s,2D’s,1E,1A,1D,1E.At this stage you won’t be able to play without stopping in between the chord changes, this comes later.
Week 3
In this lesson we will focus again on the first song, Mull O’Kintyre.
If you play the chords of the song through it won’t be recognizable as Mull O’ Kintyre so you need to add the singing. This is a problem at this stage as you won’t be able to change the chords quickly enough to play the song. However you can still sing the song with pauses in between the chord changes. We will also look at a new strum in this lesson.
Week 4
For the second strum we are on to our second song,’ The times they are a changin’. You will see that on every second bar in the song the strum pattern changes. You can play this other pattern if you wish but there is no need to, so we can stick to the first strum pattern all the way through. Also take note that we will play the first 8 bars twice before going on to line 3.
Week 5
In this lesson you can learn to play some ‘melody notes’ i.e. the melody notes of the chorus of candle in the wind. Its very difficult to play it all at this stage but you can play some of it. The next strum is a 4/4 strum i.e. four beats to the bar. The strum is just 4 downbeats but there’s quite a lot of changes so you will need to familiarize yourself with the chord sequence.
Week 6
We will begin this lesson by revising the first three songs i.e. Mull O’Kintyre, The times they are a changin’, and candle in the wind. If you can sing even a little bit along with these songs it’s very good progress.( When you start out, one of the hardest things to master is singing and playing together)We will also introduce in this lesson a new 4/4 strum pattern which will prove very useful as it’s used in so many songs.
Week 7
The strum that we learned in the last lesson can now be used for our next song, ‘blowin’ in the wind’. The melody notes for the chorus are given so you can try that. You should practice this strum a lot before you try doing the song as it can be hard to keep the complex rhythm going with the additional problem of changing chords and perhaps singing.
Week 8
We will start this lesson with a practice session of the blowin’ in the wind strum. In this session we will play with a ‘fixed’ A chord i.e. without changing chords, to get the strum hand used to the rhythm and to get a good flow going before we try the song again. We will also introduce a new strum for the song ‘Hey Jude’ in this lesson.
Week 9
In this lesson we are introduced to a new chord; E7. It is easy to play though as you will see there are two versions of it and the first one shown is the easy one. The 7th chords produce a subtle but very effective change of sound in a song. For the song Hey Jude we need to double up on the chords i.e. play 2 A’s,2 E’s,2 E7’s,2 A’s,2 D’s,2 A’s,1 E,1 E7 and 2 A’s.
We will also look at a variety of strums in the summary.
Week 10
In this lesson we will do a revision of the 5 songs we’ve learned, Mull O’Kintyre, The times they are a changin’, candle in the wind, blowin’ in the wind and hey Jude. We will also touch on the bass strum style(a new kind of strum) in 3/4 and 4/4 rhythm
I use a course book ‘the complete guitar player’ and move the students step by careful step through the journey of learning to play guitar. The courses are interesting, compelling and fun.
Course Day & Time: Thursday evening 7.30 – 9.30 pm
Start Date: 21/09/23
Cost: €110 (This fee includes a course book which will be supplied by the tutor).
Course Format: With tutor in class. Maximum of 10 students.
Duration: 10 weeks
Enrolment: You can enrol online from Wednesday the 9th of August at 10am by clicking on the Enrol here Easy Payments Plus button.
Please Note: You have to bring your own guitar to class each week.
Tutor: Brendan Farrell
An experienced guitar teacher based in Raheny with over 30 years experience. I founded the ‘Harmony school of music’ in Fairview in the early nineties where I taught guitar to a wide variety of students of all ages from absolute beginners to advanced in groups and individually. I have taught guitar in Malahide Community School for some years with both beginners and continuation/improvers.
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